Street Fighter X Tennis: Facepunch Reveal Deuce

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The revelation that Facepunch Studios were not working exclusively on Rust, but daring to prototype new games like Riftlight too (spoiler: this happens literally everywhere), sent some people on the Internet into a bit of a tizzy. “They are probably going to be even angrier to find out that we have three other prototypes being worked on,” head Facepuncher Garry Newman said.

Now they’ve revealed the first of these others, Deuce. It’s a cross between Street Fighter and tennis, which lands it somewhere around one of the Mario sports games.

Deuce is the work of Facepunch’s Ian James, who’s going wild with fighting game tropes–unique special hits for characters, elemental effects, and stages with interactive elements. It’s still only a prototype, but this video shows they’ve got the basics working. More characters, locations, special moves and so on are planned as work continues.

Facepunch are sharing the game’s Trello development whiteboard publicly for us all to poke at, a look into the internals of game development that’s full of interesting tidbits. Another video from earlier this month shows off some longer rallies and just how overpowered the tornado attack is. The Ideas tab ideas is especially great, exploring ways to develop the story, characters’ backgrounds, and everything else. I recommend particularly the ramblings of good ol’ Craig Pearson, formerly of writing-here fame. Here’s another of his contributions, proposing changing Deuce’s name to TENNISFACE:

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I curiously checked around on the Rust Steam and the Rust official forums. People are in a full out rage over Facepunch working on other games. Also apparently there are more hackers than legit players.

Anyone thats actually played the game and/or keeps up with goings on care to clarify things any?

Rust, in the form that most people know, has been dropped for a different version. There’s a long story to this, but the crux of the matter is the team had a grand plan behind what they want Rust to be, and the version they put all that work into wasn’t going to support it, so they started over.

On Steam there’s two versions of Rust: the original, which hasn’t been developed for months and does suffer the attention of hackers (though there’s not more than legit players), and the Experimental Branch that receives between 10 and 20 updates per-day. That’s the version of Rust that we’re going forward. It’s looking really good, and the goal is to get it up to the standard of the original version and then, when it’s deemed appropriate, make it the main version on Steam. We don’t know when that’ll happen.

Anyway, like every game dev, Facepunch also has prototypes that people are working on. Rust was one of these, and it was exclusively funded by Garry’s Mod. But unlike most devs, we didn’t want to keep them secret. These aren’t announcements of full games, but of internal projects that have gotten to a point where the dev team (often just a single person who has never worked on Rust) wanted to talk about it publicly.

Now some people think that any money paid to FP for Rust needs to be spent on Rust and not on the studio, because it’s Early Access and they maybe see it as funding development.

But if a game is successful in Early Access, like Rust, you don’t need all that money to fund the rest of development. More money isn’t a magic instant solution to game development. It doesn’t instantly make your game better, and there are plenty of risks to just throwing new staff members at a project to get it done faster (see APB, for instance). You’re paying money to the studio, not to the game; how they see fit to use that money is their business.

And Rust is still being updated. Regularly. Facepunch is not a one-man indie studio, and have the capacity to work on multiple projects at once.

@HadToLogin: Using Early Access to fund development of a game is one use for it, although frankly it’s the more problematic use, as the odds are good that a game won’t raise enough development funds to finish the work and the devs will be left with having sold a bunch of people an unfinished game. (Which no one wants.) The other use for Early Access is to work out and iterate on the dynamics of a multiplayer game with the benefit of actual players, which is what they’re doing.
What’s happening in this situation is actually ideal – they have a fully funded development team continuing to work on the project, but enough resources to also have a few people think ahead towards the next game and/or do something small on the side. This means a better chance at long-term survival for the studio, and thus long-term support for Rust. It’s win/win.

I remember playing this one volleyball type game back in Korea that used Romance of the Three Kingdom characters and had Street Fighter -like attacks. Did I just totally imagine that? Any other readers out there know what game that was? Can’t seem to google it :(.

You can build logic gates with hidraulics, and probably one screen with water or sand or nails. Nobody say you need to build gates with electricity. Is only that electricity is easy to shape to our will and is fast. While building even the simpler of the computers with steam energy, or hidraulics, would require a lot of energy and space. A 4 bits calculator would need a entire building.

Perhaps future computers will use light, instead of electricity, for most of the calculations. But probably we will still use electricity for I/O stuff.